RUTHFULLY YOURS

As God is my witness: I didn’t even know ABC was being sued by Donald Trump.

Did you? I missed the story completely in late March. I went back to check on what I was doing then, and the answer was writing about “Bloodbathgate,” so I don’t have much of an excuse. (To recall that trifling fake-news kerfuffle from the early campaign is to remind ourselves of how much this election cycle has spiritually aged us.) But, yes, Trump sued ABC News for defamation on March 19, and just yesterday ABC News announced a shockingly large settlement agreement: They will pay him a whopping $15 million — though as a face-saving gesture they are being allowed to pay it to his presidential library as opposed to Trump himself.

It’s all the more hilarious of a victory because I never saw it coming: Trump just got ABC News to agree to being one of the single largest corporate donors to the eventual Official Museum of MAGA Studies. They’re building his library! (To complete the victory, ABC will also cover Donald Trump’s attorneys’ fees, a concession that surely occasioned an enormous sigh of relief from Donald Trump’s attorneys.)

The instigating event actually took place on March 10, when South Carolina representative Nancy Mace appeared on ABC’s This Week, a show that, while I was growing up in the D.C. area, was distinguished by the precise, elegantly patrician demeanor of its host, David Brinkley. Brinkley was famous as one of the last news anchors to insist on writing all of his own copy, which is why it bore such a distinct tone.

Nowadays This Week is the province of diminutive ex–hatchet man George Stephanopoulos, a nasty little Dökkálfr who graduated from slandering groped women on behalf of Bill Clinton and his “bimbo eruptions” during the 1992 campaign to gently condescending to the nation in a grizzled sneer on Good Morning America — and did all this so quickly that nobody ever stopped to point out that he simulates genuine human warmth as convincingly as AI depicts floor gymnastics. Stephanopoulos has never pretended to be a journalist: He is a Democratic partisan who holds his position because of his unthreatening height and professional connections with establishment power brokers, not his insight or tendency to ask probing questions.

And I doubt he does his own prep work anymore, because if he had he wouldn’t have legitimately opened ABC to such an embarrassing defamation case. As the Bulwark’s Marc Caputo points out, he began his fateful segment with Nancy Mace almost breathlessly, rushing through his notes to read the talking points of his opening question:

George Stephanopoulos: Thank you for joining us this morning. You’ve endorsed Donald Trump for president. Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape, and for defaming the victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony we just saw?

Nancy Mace: Well I will tell you, I was raped at the age of 16, and any rape victim will tell you — I’ve lived for 30 years with an incredible amount of shame over being raped, I didn’t come forward because of that judgment and shame that I felt. And it’s a shame that you will never feel, George. And I’m not going to sit here on your show and be asked a question meant to shame me about another potential rape victim, I’m not, I’m not gonna do that.

GS: It’s actually not about shaming you, it’s a question about Donald Trump—

NM: No, you are shaming me.

GS: You’ve endorsed Donald Trump for president, Donald Trump has been found liable for rape, by a jury. Donald Trump has been found liable for defaming the victim of that rape by a jury, it’s been affirmed by a judge. He repeated the—

NM: It was not a criminal court case, number one. Number two, I live with shame, and you’re asking me a question about my political choices trying to shame me as a rape victim, and I find that disgusting. And quite frankly, E. Jean Carroll’s comments when she did get the judgment, joking about what she was going to buy, it doesn’t — it makes it harder for women to come forward when they make a mockery out of rape, when they joke about it. It’s not okay.

GS: Doesn’t it make it harder for women to come forward when they are defamed by presidential candidates?

Mace and Stephanopoulos continued sparring and interrupting each other. Mace ended by saying that Stephanopoulos’s using her background as a rape survivor to compel her to make a public condemnation of Trump on the E. Jean Carroll charges was insulting — and that such behavior is one of the reasons why rape victims have trouble coming forward. It was at this point when Stephanopoulos mustered all the smugness of which he is capable for a final mic drop riposte: “Women won’t come forward because they are defamed by people who perpetrate rape.”

And that’s pretty much where he cut his own network’s throat. For, as National Review readers are no doubt already aware, not only is what Stephanopoulos confidently stated multiple times as legal fact — that Donald Trump was “found liable for rape” — not true, the opposite was held to be the case by the jury.

I’m completely uninterested in relitigating E. Jean Carroll’s allegations against Trump — my short take is that I believe Trump to be capable of God-knows-what, and yet I don’t believe her for a second. As a simple matter of legal fact, however, Stephanopoulos got the nature of the verdict wildly and recklessly wrong, over and over again — aggressively so. The Manhattan jury that found Trump liable for an indeterminate sexual offense pointedly stipulated that Carroll didn’t prove rape. That they reached that verdict in a civil trial, where the incredibly permissive “preponderance of the evidence” standard is used (as opposed to the “beyond a reasonable doubt” one), is evidence enough how even the least favorable jury imaginable for Donald Trump found Carroll’s claim of rape unpersuasive.

You owe it to yourself to watch the video to appreciate how Stephanopoulos’s sermonizing tone — as he is in the midst of incurring millions of dollars in legal damages — makes him so insufferable and the eventual outcome so satisfying. The fickle gods of irony must have been displeased and delighted in equal measure to see this sort of legally actionable ignorance from a man who used to gleefully destroy the names and reputations of his boss’s paramours (willing or otherwise) and who somehow managed to spin that gig into his present job.

Yes, I’m reacting to news of the ABC payout to Trump to settle his defamation suit with the same line that old Grandpa Blehar — a hardworking western New York railroad man — used whenever the Yankees won: “Ain’t the beer cold, boys?” I love to see this. Nobody will ever mistake me for a Trump partisan, but by the same token I yield to no man in my contempt for the corruption, bias, and sloth of the mainstream media, which has shucked its skin of respectability and devolved into a niche market for the few aging progressives who still get their news from television.

I enjoy seeing ABC get what’s coming to it for its arrogance and carelessness, and it couldn’t have involved a more deserving agent of disaster than the odious Stephanopoulos, who will otherwise pay no price professionally for the incident. I saw one former mainstream media journalist dismiss the $15 million settlement as analogous to “Disney avoiding legal costs” and had to laugh. Big media corporations do not drop that much money, plus attorneys’ fees and a televised apology, merely to avoid costs. They do so because they fear that worse things might become public. Neither side would have enjoyed the discovery process in this case, but ABC had far, far more to lose than Donald Trump.

As for Nancy Mace — a congresswoman I have criticized in the past for her unartful clout-chasing — even she did a decent enough job of holding up her side of the exchange. I wish she had pointed out to Stephanopoulos’s face that he was lying through his teeth when he said a jury had found Trump liable for rape, but, had that happened, the lawsuit might never have been filed. That said, it would be beyond churlish of me not to offer her a genuine tip of the cap: This is how to get your name in the news in a memorably good way. Not a publicity stunt but rather a TV appearance in which you successfully goad a malignant dwarf into inflicting a massive defamation settlement on his own company. So, grab a Mickey’s Big Mouth too, Nancy, and enjoy a leisurely victory lap. The beer is definitely ice-cold today.